Life Notes

The Nothing
By Tim Russ

(Genesis 1:1-3 NIV) In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. {2} Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. {3} And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

In the beginning God created the universe. Before this was the nothing. There was nothing except God and his kingdom. Yet, God felt the need to create something and place it into the nothing so he created the universe.

We look at the physical universe and in our limited knowledge we wrongly assume that what we see is reality. This universe is temporary. It is a small pocket of physical matter that exists as a framework upon which God hangs his grace as a display.

(Isaiah 34:4 NIV) All the stars of the heavens will be dissolved and the sky rolled up like a scroll; all the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine, like shriveled figs from the fig tree.

The time is coming when a new heaven and a new earth will exist and God will merge his supernatural kingdom and this physical universe.

(Revelation 21:1 NIV) Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

The universe began and it will end. The spiritual kingdom of God and the physical kingdom of God will merge. Yet the nothing will continue to exist just as it does today.

God is in the habit of creating something out of nothing. He told Abram that he was the father of many nations while he was still childless. In fact he changed his name to Abraham which means “father of many nations”. God makes it a habit to speak things into existence out of the nothing.

(Romans 4:17)

The exercise of faith is the practice of reaching into the nothing and pulling out something. We trust God that when we pray he will take that prayer mingled with faith and cause a creative miracle. The bible puts it this way:

(Hebrews 11:1-3)

I have tried to imagine nothing. I have no concept of what a lack of anything could look like. It would not have any physical or measurable characteristics. The only thing that could allow us to identify it is the total lack of anything whatsoever.

This concept of nothing producing something flies in the face of logic. It is unreasonable. We are not able to analyze it. We cannot measure it. It cannot be proven or disproven through the reasoning abilities of mankind.

One could argue that human beings are formed out of nothing. A man and a woman come together in unity and provide the basic building blocks of life. Well that’s something isn’t it? Perhaps but the human body physical matter. Without the spirit that God places within that physical matter there is no real human being. Is that spiritual part of a human formed by human joining or is it produced from nothing and implanted by God? It depends upon how you approach the question.

Each of us eventually comes to a point in our life where we look into the nothing. Some of us see God. Some of us see, well, nothing. Perhaps it is the way we approach the nothing that determines what we find. Approaching the nothing with nothing provides nothing. Approaching the nothing with something reveals something. Take a moment to look into the nothing. What do you see there?

Copyright © 2008 Tim Russ.  All rights reserved.